Tag Archives: pedestrians

Here’s our weekly review rounding up the best stories and ideas in public space from cities around the world. This week we bring you 250 “alternative” blocks of sidewalks in Seattle, love letters for that special city in your life and New York City plants its millionth tree. Continue reading →

Here’s our weekly review rounding up the best stories and ideas in public space from cities around the world. This week we bring you the activation of alley ways in Cairo, fighting the privatization of cities’ public spaces and the draw of memorable streets.

On Jun. 12, 2015, the city of Victoria introduced a parklet pilot project in its downtown core. Billed as an “urban oasis,” the temporary public space spans the length of two parallel parking stalls, offering pedestrians a barrier-free space to enjoy downtown life. Continue reading →

Here’s our weekly review rounding up the best stories and ideas in public space from cities around the world. This week we bring you the mathematical formula of pedestrian behaviour, desertification in Mongolia and the real SimCity.

Just below the bustling streets of Canada’s biggest city sits another city. The PATH is a 29-km network of underground walkways that allows pedestrians to navigate Toronto’s downtown core, safe from cars and harsh weather. Continue reading →

This past summer, New York City’s Department of Transportation (DOT) rolled out the first stage of its WalkNYC campaign, a newly designed wayfinding system that highlights walking as an integral mode of public transit.

Here’s our weekly review rounding up the best stories and ideas in public space from cities around the world. This week we bring you a Summer Streets Festival in NYC, spider play in Dusseldorf and the power of a good paint job in Sao Paulo. Continue reading →

The plan for Manhattan’s grid was published in 1811 when most New Yorkers still lived at the very tip of Lower Manhattan. Without respect to topography, the grid divided the island into neat little blocks convenient for development, tidily accommodating the city’s rapid population growth and northward expansion. Except for the monumental subtraction of Central Park, the grid was built out essentially intact over the following two centuries. Continue reading →

At the Peterson Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, you can see a recreation of an early strip mall, still roughly human-scale and oriented toward the street with open storefronts and small businesses. The history of cars in Los Angeles is full of many such forgotten losses, reports Sarah Goodyear. (via The Atlantic Cities)

Using 40,000 Google StreetView images, researchers have determined which visual elements most define a dozen cities around the world. Paris, it turns out, is not defined by the Eiffel Tower but instead the character of its street signs, lamp posts, and balcony railings. It’s science! (via GOOD)

Using traffic counts made freely available by the City, Jake Schabas has plotted a map putting pedestrian and vehicle volumes across Toronto in perspective. As inspiration he cites one of the main principles of Gehl Architects: what gets measured gets done. (via Spacing Toronto)

Here’s our weekly review rounding up the best stories and ideas in public space from cities around the world. This week we bring you smart cities, the ugliest pedestrian tunnel in Toronto, using smart phones to get people to walk more, and is Curitiba losing its sustainable city edge?